Tech, culture clash
INTRODUCTION:
What lies behind the wave of corruption at all levels of government in our nation? Has Corporate Organization poisoned the waters for fair and just treatment of citizens in our society? Can the world be made safe for democracy? Or is it for that purpose or Corporate Profiteering? This paper will analyze the origins of Western economic and political thought before the French Revolution in an effort to discover the source of possible incongruence in our contemporary economic and political thinking in this country today. Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come and surely the ideas that gave birth to Merchant Capitalism and Parliamentary Democracy in England during the age of Reason had a dominant impact on our own young nation as it groped for rationale in its founding and thereafter (See Paine, common Sense, and Madison and Hamilton, the Federalist Papers) Man is a delicate balance between fact and illusion between realism and fantasy and works such as Thomas Hobbes "Leviathan" and Adam Smith "Wealth of Nations" were written in Dark days and desperate times. They may themselves have relied on Western thinking even further removed, likewise subject to popular acclaim and expediency of judgment. Now, Modern America, on the threshold of globalizing its social, political, and economic ethos is deeply dependent on this hand full of thinkers for the rationale of its daily domestic and international policy. A policy that seems with the dawning of each new day more convoluted, contrived, and misplaced than the day before (See Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader and Al Gore) Could we have been misled by the original thinking at the dawn of another, prior, phase of globalization? The discovery of the New World and the impact that had on the accompanying Protestant Reformation in formulation of modern Europe. For most of our ideas establishing all our major institutions in the United States, regardless of our multi-culturalism, come almost exclusively from Western Europe. For we each are guided by our thoughts and feelings of the moment, informed by the input of our experience and knowledge of our collective past. And almost none of us are likely to have reason to re-examine our foundations for structural defects in the corner stone of Western Society laid at the close of the Feudal era. I have made such a study.
SECTION ONE (summary)
It's the Age of Discovery. Cromwell has captured British imagination. England will soon be the supreme Empire on the High Seas. Democracy is the light in Shakespeare's eye, the Apple of Philosophy and theological dissent long ago and far away. The rewards of present strife toward the attainment of future success and accomplishment. For the perfection of man is the goal of all creation and the final creed by which people must measure them. Freedom, National Purpose and personal fulfillment and independence are the stakes. People must make sense of all this garble, select or nominate successive rulings to govern his life by and the path by which posterity will assume its place in paradise. Progress remains the issue over which people's minds strain to keep. Was all the bloodshed on all the fields of battle worth the whistle or was it as Shakespeare had it sound and fury, signifying nothing? We must return to that yesteryear to see if this world we strive to fulfill meets the test of the standards and specifications set forth in the original design. What were those purposes set out for posterity? Was it as they thought, or merely mumblypeg and ground dust, insufficient to the metal of his ambition, lust and greed which turned a project into a purgatory of totalitarian nightmares worthy of Dante's Inferno from which the dye was case and to which man had pledged never to return.
SECTION TWO (summary)
England is no longer the lion in winter. France and Germany challenge Plato's Realm and heritage at the feet of the world. Egypt was a legendary kingdom of tranquility and unchangeable tradition from the start. Israel's Jews challenge the Pharaohs descendent from Ra, the sun king only to be swallowed up themselves and scattered like leaves of grass on the face of the West by Roman occupation and tyranny. Nothing save the ministry of Christ, Paul and early Christians raising the hope of salvation from the servitude of slavery down to the Middle Ages (New Testament, The Republic, Lives of Noble Greeks and Romans) This was the heritage of Machiavelli and the Renaissance of Leonardo DiVinchi's Italy where the torch of freedom, Independence and thought began to flicker in the night against the cold darkness of medieval transgressions, Viking Plunder, and the New Age of Discovery. Chaucer had heralded the liberty of the English Subject in his Canterbury Tales eulogizing for all time the world of Tomas A Becket, Richard the Lionhearted and the Great Charter by which monarchs and rulers are bound for the first time all Creation to the observance of the liberty of subjects and standards of conduct a society would no longer stoop to ignore (The City of God, The Prince) Italy had been the turf of Popes, the home of Saints and origins of the Birth of Martyrs.
Divided, quarrelling and subjugated by the rulers of City States, Machiavelli cried out for order from chaos and government form the hands of folly. "My Kingdom, My kingdom for a horse! Shakespeare mockingly put it in Richard III. It was widely wondered whether Machiavelli solution, prescription and medium were not worse than the social disease Thomas Aquinas faced as he labored under Summa Theological to reconcile the irreconcilable and bring forth faith of the Gentiles in line with and under rule of order prescribed by Plato, Aristotle and the Sophists. Was Plato right, Was Democracy a greater folly than it was worth? Could man govern earth as God Governed his Kingdom in Heaven?
SECTION THREE (summary)
Thomas Hobbes under the shadow of Cromwell's long Parliament took up the cross of Christ and explored for the first time the Kingdom at Hand. What had God Wrought? Was it for good or ill? This would under the legacy of his Leviathan, challenge of Machiavelli to Spinoza whose solution was sought from John Locke to Rousseau to Adam Smith. What had Man wrought? To what salvation can he cling to in his quest from liberation and independence of tyrants, dictators and terrorists bent on bringing their will upon Mankind thoughout learned Europe. For the next two centuries the question was posed, Can Man govern himself? What price must society pay to give him that much freedom? The alternative was to continue to live in the path of medieval theocracy and totalitarian nightmare of ignorance and doubt feared by everyone who thought as Chairman Mao said in his little RED Book, Power comes from the barrel of a gun (Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic, The Leviathan)
SECTION FOUR (summary)
Meanwhile Locke and Rousseau argued for the good in Man, not his weaknesses to establish democratic ideals. Is this the world envisioned by the design enunciated by Locke, Rousseau and Smith? Is this the City of God Augustine professed could not be reached in this world, but only in the next?
We have followed that path some ways now. It should be evident to all there has been an error in the delivery of our freedom to posterity that global community require the consensus of a Council of Nations. Geopolitical boundaries set by the experience of colonization and mercantile systems, Institutions and man have kept us prisoners to our soul, our minds and our future. We can't abide by the straightjacket of the past. Revolution in Western thinking is on the horizon dawning in the homes and camps of the Third World (Second Treatise on Civil Government, On Inequality, The Social Contract)
SECTION FIVE (Summary)
Our founding fathers, having fought a Revolution based on Locke and Rousseau, betrayed their goals with the adoption of the Federal Constitution, reversing our national goals for those of Smith and Hobbes (The Economic Interpretation of the constitution by Charles Beard, Paine again) Karl Marx warned the West in Das Capital of the folly it pursued. Sigmund Freud's struggle to free man of his bogeyman of fear that cast the bondage of Such Leviathans as England, France and Germany. Man cast imperial domain aside when he formed the United Nations only to be betrayed by the Brenton Woods agreement. Betrayed in this world of exchange, having lost his freedom of self government 200 years before with the authorship of the American Constitution, Western Man now clings to the tenuous life raft of hope in his inventions, high tech theocracy, and new age quest for space to solve a problem that can only be solved at its origins in the center of thinking past, not the creation of post modern, post structural, ex-post serial living as he tries to escape his post even as he can't attain a future worthy in the name of the treadmill of wage slavery and media dictatorship propelling tyranny and totalitarianism unworthy of the name.
SECTION SIX AND CONCLUSION (summary and To Do)
The foundations of our national institutions, economic and political, are based on contradictory values and beliefs. Any culture is limited by those values and beliefs. Had we embraced the good in man rather than the evil, from the cornerstone to the keystone we would have a very different society and global community.
I am indebted to the lectures of Ted Hamilton of Columbia Community College for putting into perspective my disassociated views and motivating me to take on the task; to Dennis Manning for grilling me on the importance of value and belief in the cornerstone of any culture. To the students at San Jose State in the late 1960s who embarked on the expedition to find the source of authority and genius for self-government; and Dr Robert Clark for convening a Commission I was associated with in pursuit of the freedom, and responsibility that comes with such self governing principles. This is the result of those studies.
Tim K Fitzgerald
East and West are not only a study of differences but a study of opposites, each seeking a different solution to the existential anxiety in the alienation of Man. Thinkers both East and West eventually left with the dilemma, �And now, what IS?� We are every moment making our characters and shaping our destinies. The history of philosophy in India as well as Europe being one long illustration o f the inability of the human mind to solve the mystery of the relation of God to the World. We are thus forced to conclude with Spangler in his �Decline of the West�: There is not �one� sculpture, �one� painting, �one� mathematic, �One Physics�But many, each in its deepest essence different from the others. Spangler concluding,� I see in place of that empty figment of �one� linear History�the Drama of a number of mighty cultures�coming straight from the mother region which it remains firmly bound through its whole �life cycle.� (Spangler 17)
The Hindu of India finding in evil, a disharmony with the truth, which he believes encompasses and contains the world. Whereas the West dares to ask, as do persons from Johnny Cash to Pilate at Christ judgment, �What is Truth?� The Hindu on the other hand insisting on a spiritual and ethical outlook on life. The Indian believing the Day of Judgment is not in some remoter future, but here and now � with none able to escape it. The divine laws he believes cannot be evaded � as they are not imposed from without but wrought in our nature. (Radhakrishnan 53) On the other hand, the psychologist Rollo May speaking for the Westerner, says it is their view that the human being gets his experience in being a �self� out of his relatedness to other persons. From the point of view of his ontological existentialism, thus when he is alone he is afraid he will lose this experience of �self.� But I would conclude with Spangler, this self-knowledge and objectivity of all persons is largely dependent on cultural attributes. The West embracing supremacy and fulfillment from the overcoming of conflict, the East finding peace and tranquility from resignation and resolution.
Progress thus being objectively set by the drives of the communal organization and society. Yet both faces of civilization, east and West, seem to agree with William James, �Those who are concerned with making the world healthier had best start with themselves. (Quoted May 79) As both sides see man�s existential dilemma in hiss suffering. In the West, May points out many people suffer fro the fear of finding oneself alone. �And so they don�t find themselves at all.� All man�s history in the West being an endeavor to shatter his loneliness. The Hindu way offering hope to the West, as Shan Kara is a Yogi leading to self-knowledge, something of a new frontier for the European mind bent on conquest and material acquisition. In Indian thinking, a system of thought � a point of view � recognizes the legitimacy and worth of competing systems; rather than accepting an Aristotelian two�sided view. As a result the Indian thinks in terms of many degrees and aspects of truth � truth and value shifting as one takes a different point o view (POV)Organ 22-23)
Effort is made to reconcile differences within a cognitive whole in the East, rather than push differences into sharp conflict, as does the West. The implication being progress for the West arises from conflict, and in the East in Resolution. May pointing out in the West, neurotic anxiety is the sign of an unresolved conflict within us, clinically speaking. This raises the historical graphical question as to the role of change in East and West. For Radhakrishnan, the eternal is manifest in the temporal, the latter the pathway to the former � truth in the finite leading us to the infinite. Inductive rather than deductive reasoning. Truth taken by the Hindu as Man as the whole � all his activities having an overarching unity. Whereas, for the West, life is dissected and several.
In the Indian, Dharma of virtue being the conformity with the truth of things as they are. IN the West, Man having all but given up on the pursuit of virtue, with the embracement acquisition and conquest. Hence the acceptance of th4e world as a struggle to overcome and oppose would be a vice for the Hindu and progress for Western Minds. (Radhakrishnan 56)
For Plato and Aristotle could not conceive o f man living apart fro the polis, but for the Hindu solitude of the forest were the only path to enlightenment. IRONICALLY, BOTH SIDES INS AGREEMENT �ENLIGHTENMENT �SHOULD BE THE GOAL. The Hindu withdr4ew in order to meditate The West seeking encounter and dialogue for the same goal Both are in line with the Oracle of Delphi uttering the goal :�To Know thy self.� And In keeping with the teachings of Socrates to the effect �the unexamined life is not wor5th living.�
It being Descartes and Medieval thinking of the Scholastics that put an emphasis on the �City of Man� separate from the �City of God� The mind separate from the body. A first proposed in concept by Saint Augustine. This created a schism or dichotomy for western thought down to the present.
It could be concluded western philosophy is a natural philosophy, being chiefly concerned with the problems of the external world. While Indian Philosophy is �more psychological� � abiding closely with Christ�s adage �The kingdom of God is within. � But perhaps having contributed to the confusion when he went on to add, �Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar�s and unto God that which is Gods.�
Shan Kara creating an aspect of Hindu philosophy to led to action that relieves Man of his suffering. These are vastly different views of Human understanding � the teaching of Plato being to know the good and retain it for itself (Organ 21) This is recognized by western thinkers like Paul Tillich who claims �despair and anxiety can never we worked out until one confronts them in their stark and full reality. Rollo May concurring stating overcoming loneliness is only possible assume courageously access his aloneness to begin with. Thus it would seem modern psychology has come to embrace the Eastern conclusions. But in the culture of the West our aim is to devise ways in which we can stand against our insecurity. The key in both being to find a center of strength to pint the way toward achieving values (truths) which can be depended upon May pointing out that put s the West�s faith in change. Shan Kara in the unbending and eternal Atman.
According to Organ, Western Man�s activity is an opiate which deadens his self-awareness (the Greek word for solitude � idios- having been perverted into Idiot. Yet it is observed the irony that man still seeks the solitude in his activity while he flees from himself. Seldom suspecting it is himself that he fears. (Organ 41) �Indian philosophy being more focused in the synthetic group or underlying principles. Than the Western analytic method handed down from Descartes in discovering distinctions.� (Radhakrishnan quote in Organ 20)
To Shan Kara Truth is eternal and a truth once held continues to be held so far as it is possible. Seeking to preserve the insights of the past, progress is not conceived as destroying the old order to make way for the new. As Richard Lamoy says,� The Indian traditionalist has no faith in his power to change history; because to him there is no �history.� Conformism being fundamental to the Indian mind with no wish to develop from tradition.
The Atman and the Brahman are the higher consciousness and spirituality explained and spoken of by Christ and Socrates. The Indian typically asking if the western �either / or� ought not to be discarded for the law of �this-as-well-as-that.� The �Mayan � to Shan Kara being th e world of appearances and material substance of the world according to our bodily demands Shan Kara insisting to achieve Atman as Brahman you must look past surface appearances of the Mayan of earthly bounds to the �deep structure� spoken of by anthropologist, Clifford Geetz. This �Deep structure� or spiritual significance and enlightenment attributed by the spiritual masters 9s the product of knowledge and learning professed by Shan Kara. Shan Kara�s yogi being one of several ways or paths in Hindu religion to higher consciousness of Brahman. The man liberated from time (and history being the highest ideal in Hindu�the Juarnmuskta. Thus it is that where development of western thought usually involves destruction of the old to make way for the new, development in Indian thought consists in retaining the insights of previous thought and act upon these insights. (Organ 243
America is almost totally a nation of immigrants. Its institutions are based almost exclusively on Western Europe before 1800. Although �Social Darwinism� of the late 1800s does much to explain changes in America since then, it does little to shed light on its founding principles.
The Nation is now a world leader in commerce, politics and international business, and has had that goal before it since the time of Webster, Calhoun, and Clay - it now having singled out the objective of displacing the authority of the Soviet Union as a competitor in the late 20th century.
America�s political leaders are a mixed bag. Some like Lincoln, the two Roosevelt�s, Washington, and Jefferson, came to the forefront of national acclaim at a time of crisis and need in the nation. Others like Fillmore who precipitated the Civil War, and Grant and Hays, who brought about the �Gilded Age,� left much to be desired in national leadership. Still others like Jackson, Kennedy, and Reagan were men of the people.
The American Revolution that established the nation per se, settled in the West many debated issues, including: the equality of men, with whom sovereignty rested, and to what extent �capital� was to play in the developing of Western Nationalism. And this played well when the young nation took its place amongst its European allies.
The Civil War brought to a head an issue left undetermined in the founding - that of the plight of the Negro and the role slavery was to play in the nation�s economy. And leaving a deep scar in the national fabric that did not begin to heel until after World War II with the dawn of Civil and human rights movements.
This nation began to assume an important role on the national stage with the close of World War I, and took the lead when the Second World War settled much of the doubt about the kind of political organization Nation States would take in the West. It has since turned out a productive capacity literally unheard of in any prior age, leaving the world to wonder what changes must take place to provide liberty for the reminder of humanity.
With 5% of the world�s population using up 45% of the worlds annual resources, this can not long endure without forsaking our cherished values of liberty and freedom for mankind which the nation long stood for, and to whose banner the world has thus far rallied. Responsibility for world leadership being awesome much as those before us, England, France, and Spain well know and we are in good company if we can but maintain the peace and provide for the security and well being for ourselves and our allies worldwide.